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To Promote Unusual Films, Try Uncommon Marketing

MARKETING movies is about finding an audience. But what if an audience does not want to be found?

This was the problem facing Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing Tommy Lee Jones's "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," a bilingual film about a Texas ranch hand (Mr. Jones) who forces a border-patrol guard (Barry Pepper), who killed an undocumented Mexican worker, to escort the body back to Mexico. Not surprisingly, one of this film's target audiences is Mexican immigrants -- both legal and illegal.

To reach this group, Sony Classics promoted the film in Spanish-language newspapers and magazines. But the studio went one step further, seeking to cross-promote the film with Jarritos, the Mexican soft drink company. Negotiations broke down when Jarritos learned that the film had shots of a product made by a competitor, Topo Chico. So the studio cut a promotions deal with Topo Chico.

Asked how he discovered the possible connection between the "Three Burials" audience and products like Jarritos, Sony Classics' co-president, Tom Bernard, said his children ordered the soda, leading him to ask what it was. He later pursued the company after learning how popular such drinks are in the United States. It is just one example of how distributors of independent films market products that typically have narrow appeal -- movies with an "overcome," in marketing terms.

The overcome often involves difficult subject matter, unconventional storytelling, an unfamiliar cast or a combination of these things. According to Warner Independent Pictures' president, Mark Gill, finding audiences for these films is "labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive." Instead of blanketing the airwaves and print media with advertisements, as the major studios do for movies with mass appeal, independent film companies must be clever about how to find and lure customers.

Mr. Gill and other distributors pursue a variety of approaches. Almost all of them start from the premise that their films will appeal to the art-house crowd. Reviews count for more among that audience than among the people who go to see mainstream films. (An exception is Joel Zwick's "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," which did well in 2002 despite mixed responses from critics.)

"There's no fooling the art audience," said Mr. Gill. "You can reach every group you can think about, but if you get a bad review, you're dead."

But sometimes even great reviews or broad ancillary coverage cannot overcome an audience's discomfort with a film's subject matter -- or title -- as in the case of Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's highly regarded film "Murderball," a documentary about wheelchair rugby players, distributed by Thinkfilm.

"There literally wasn't an image that didn't turn somebody off," said Mark Urman, head of Thinkfilm's United States theatrical operations, referring to the film's wheelchairs, tattoos and violence. "I was surprised at how many people came up to me and said, 'I don't know if I can see that.' "

A close relative of the good review, at least in terms of attracting the art audience, is a nomination or an award at a prestigious event. According to Liz Manne, a film consultant, the Venice Film Festival's top prize "signals to gatekeepers -- the media, exhibitors -- that this is a work of extreme quality." Oscar recognition, of course, reaches the public beyond the gate.

Distributors also seek to appeal to audiences that may have a relationship to the film's subject. Warner Independent promoted George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck," about the journalist Edward R. Murrow's crusade against Senator Joseph McCarthy, by trotting Mr. Clooney around the country and by screening the film for the Council on Foreign Relations, journalism schools and civil liberties groups. For Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now," about a pair of conflicted Palestinian suicide bombers, the studio showed the film to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy.

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Sometimes a film's audience can be found online. Mr. Bernard said undocumented workers often communicate over the Internet, so Sony Classics will be advertising "Three Burials" there. For "Thumbsucker," Mike Mills's coming-of-age film, Sony Classics bought all the ads on Rotten Tomatoes, a movie Web site, for four days, and spent a total of $1 million on the Web.

Many distributors say the Web's value as an advertising vehicle depends on the film, however. Not every movie is a "Blair Witch Project," whose success was widely attributed to Web chatter.

Old-fashioned legwork continues to get results, even when the road is rocky. Bob Berney, president of Picturehouse, which is distributing Giddi Dar's "Ushpizin," about an Orthodox Jewish couple whose faith is tested, arranged to screen the film for Orthodox organizations. The film, a hit in Israel, proved so appealing that some Orthodox groups began showing it at charitable fund-raisers without notifying Picturehouse. Mr. Berney said he had a ticklish job of informing this audience about the illegality of what they were doing without alienating them.

The popularity of "Ushpizin" among Orthodox Jews has spread to more mainstream Jewish audiences, and the hope is that the film will now move to others audiences as well. Distributors of independent films dream of breaking out of the specialized audience market, as Warner Independent did with Luc Jacquet's "March of the Penguins" earlier this year and Focus Features appears to be doing with "Brokeback Mountain." But the effort can be tricky.

Paramount Classics marketed Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow," a film about a pimp turned hip-hop artist that was one of the hottest commercial prospects at last year's Sundance Film Festival, to an urban audience, and lost the art-film crowd in the process -- and perhaps mainstream acceptance as well.

In the end, one of the best tools in independent marketing looks remarkably like the best tool in mainstream marketing: stars. Independent films that do not feature stars must use the technique with a bit more creativity. For "Good Night, and Good Luck," the former newsman Hugh Downs, who does not appear in the film, agreed to participate in a question-and-answer session to promote the film. For "Three Burials," Sony Classics was helped by Al Gore, who was Mr. Jones's roommate when they were students at Harvard and agreed to be host of a screening.